John Arlott's second son remembers T.H. White

 

The first time they met, my father and Tim were so captivated by each other’s company that they went out for a drink and did not return until late the following morning.

My favourite book on John Arlott is the memoir of him by his son Timothy, which also gives a much sunnier picture of another of this blog’s heroes, T.H. White, than you will find elsewhere. (T.H. stood for Terence Hanbury, but White was always ‘Tim’ to his friends after the retail chemists Timothy Whites, which was for many years Boots’ main rival on the high street.)

I’ve never understood why the biography of White by Sylvia Townsend Warner is quite so highly regarded – Timothy Arlott’s elder brother Jim, who died in a road accident at the age of 21, is the ‘Zed’ of that book – while Helen Macdonald concentrates in H is for Hawk on what you might call the more hysterical aspects of his personality.

Timothy Arlott, however, gives us a White more like the Merlyn of The Sword in the Stone:

‘Tim’ White looked a bit like Ernest Hemingway – tall, white-bearded and strongly built, also a lover of the outdoors, animals and alcohol, and a writer by trade – but that is where the similarity ends.

In summer he sometimes wore just a large scarlet towelling bathrobe over shorts. One night two rather serious young men came to his door and introduced themselves as Jehovah’s Witnesses. Flinging the door open wide, Tim boomed, ‘I am Jehovah.’ …

Biographies of Tim White have made him out to be a melancholic homosexual. I can only say we saw nothing of either. With my mother and us children during those summer holidays he was a riot. He was an enthusiast about movie cameras and making his own films about twenty years before it became popular with the general public – and Tim’s films were full of humour. 

He would organise imitations of the new ‘whiter than white’ Persil TV commercials and startle Alderney housewives leaving the grocers by descending on them with a movie camera, my brother Jim as the compere asking which washing powder they had chosen and pulling fresh ‘whiter than white’ samples out of his pockets like a conjurer If they had not chosen Persil. Even in his early teens Jim could do superb deadpan imitations of smarmy suave comperes.

The Joy of Six 1233

Janan Ganesh argues that the Tories' greatest disservice to the UK has been to misunderstand the US: "A bilateral trade deal with Washington was meant to offset the loss of unfettered access to the EU market. That no such deal emerged was bad enough (though as predictable as sunrise). But then Donald Trump and later Joe Biden embraced a wider protectionism. World trade is fragmenting as a result. So for Britain, double jeopardy: no agreement with the US, but also less and less prospect of agreements with third countries."

"This week’s official government report into the atrocities of Alderney suggests more than 1000 might have perished as a result of over-work, starvation, disease, beatings and being executed. The story of the brutal sadism of the Nazis on Alderney is not just a Jewish story. The clear majority of those who died were from the Soviet Union." Antony Barnett and Martin Bright on Lord Pickles's Alderney Expert Review.

Elisabeth Braw says countries mulling wider national service plans should learn from the Norwegian model. It's voluntary, selective and places on the scheme are highly prized.

 Steve Bowbrick finds Disney's Song of the South deserves its problematic reputation: "The movie’s full of inexplicably dark, even distressing references and cues. In an animated sequence Br’er Fox sets a trap and it’s a literal noose strung from a tree. The tar-baby sequence is inexplicably awful. Some superficial effort was made to place the film after emancipation but it makes no difference - Disney’s movie is an inescapably antebellum artefact."

"Of the webpages that existed in 2013, for instance, 38 per cent are now lost. Even newer pages are disappearing: 8 per cent of pages that existed in 2023 are no longer available." Peter Black explains why he quotes at length on his blog, rather than relying on links.

When I first joined the Liberator editorial collective, we held our paste ups - Cow Gum and Letrset, isn't it? Marvelous. - in an office at Gray's Inn. A London Inheritance looks at how its South Square was reconstructed after wartime bombing.

The Joy of Six 1227

Jan Dehn outlines the many questions being considered by the government inquiry into what happened on Alderney under Nazi occupation: "It is known that the camp held Russian and Ukrainian prisoners as well as Spanish Republicans, captured French resistance fighters, and jews, but precisely how many people were there, who they were, and where exactly they came from remains clouded in mystery. There are also suggestions in some quarters that there are mass graves on Alderney, but where they are located and who is buried in the pits is unknown."

Carlos Moreno, the father of the '15-minute city' has a new book out, reports Feargus O'Sullivan.

"'It’s become increasingly mundane to see intrusive and inappropriate surveillance technologies, once reserved for the police and prison estate, deployed in our schools,' says Caitlin Bishop, senior campaigns officer at Privacy International." Adele Walton on the dangerous rise of surveillance in UK classrooms.

Paul Powlesland tells the tragic story of Hoad’s Wood, used as a landfill and ignored by authorities, and suggests it shows we need Rights of Nature and guardianship.

"A parade in Rogation Week around the old borders of one parish ended in 1751 with an incursion into Richmond Park, which had been built a century before by king Charles I by buying, acquiring and enclosing land from several parishes - an act that had caused decades of anger and friction, as people not only lost access to common land for subsistence, collecting firewood, grazing livestock etc, but were also denied access along traditional footpaths." London Radical Histories unpacks the many meanings of the ceremony of Beating the Bounds.

Huw Turbervill ranks the 12 episodes of Fawlty Towers.

Wartime Nazi atrocities on Alderney to be reinvestigated

Embed from Getty Images

The German occupation of the Channel Islands during the second world war is likely to receive new prominence because of an official inquiry into what happened in those years on Alderney.

Unlike the other islands, Alderney was largely cleared of its population and became a prison for slave workers building Hitler's sea defences.

A report in the Observer today looks at the tensions between those who believe far more people died on the island than the official account suggests, and those who resent the issue being opened.

The paper even managed to find a local who accused Sir Eric Pickles, the UK’s Holocaust envoy, who is leading the inquiry, of "wokeism".

Martin Bright has written a long article on the Index on Censorship that sets out the case for scepticism about the current official account of what happened on Alderney during the war:

While Alderney is technically a Crown Dependency and not a part of the United Kingdom, the British government was responsible for the surrender of the Channel Islands. The occupation of these islands has always been an inconvenient truth. By the summer of 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s War Cabinet concluded the islands could not be defended, and at the beginning of July, Jersey, Guernsey, Sark and Alderney were all occupied.

However, unlike on the other islands, all but a handful of people on Alderney were evacuated. This paved the way for the island to be turned into a vast prison for slave workers constructing Hitler’s sea defences. In January 1942, therefore, four camps – Helgoland, Norderney, Sylt and Borkum – were set up for workers from so-called Operation Todt. Conventional wisdom is that the majority of those transported to the island were Russian prisoners of war. But the records show a significant proportion of those in the camps were Spanish Republicans, north African Arabs and French Jews.

The conditions on Alderney were appalling and, in common with other Nazi work camps, prisoners were beaten and starved. Many succumbed to disease. Those who could no longer work were sent to camps in mainland Europe where they were murdered. The overall numbers of those who died on the island is also the subject of academic controversy: the minimum estimate is between 700 and 1,000 people, but experts believe the actual figure could be much higher.

Immediately after the liberation of Alderney, two senior British soldiers, Major Cotton and Major Haddock, were sent to investigate war crimes. As a result, the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) office, the body responsible for bringing Nazis to justice, concluded the conditions were akin to those in other concentration camps in German-occupied territory: “The position here is somewhat similar to Belsen, stronger perhaps because the offences were committed on British territory.” A young captain, Theodore Pantcheff, was brought in to carry out a full investigation. In September 1945 he wrote: “Wicked and merciless crimes were carried out on British soil in the last three years.”

And yet Britain did not bring a single German officer to justice for what happened on Alderney. Instead, the authorities chose to focus on the Russian victims of the regime in the island’s camps and shift the responsibility for any investigation to the Soviet authorities. In October 1945, Pantcheff’s report was sent to Moscow, where it lay in the archives until 1993. The British copy was destroyed.

In particular, it seems unlikely that the official position that only eight Jews died on Alderney during will survive this renewed investigation.

Bright writes about the Jewish investigator, Marcus Roberts, who is determined to pursue the truth about the Holocaust on British soil. He believes it is possible that between 15,000 and 30,000 people died on the island, with at least 1000 being Jewish:

Roberts is the founder of the Jewish heritage charity JTrails. He began researching the Nazi camps of northern France in 2007. Two years later he turned his attention to the Channel Islands. He has been pushing for official recognition of Alderney as a Holocaust site, the establishment of an appropriate memorial and protection of Jewish graves. Roberts has established it was not just French Jews who were sent to Alderney; there were Jews from many from other parts of Europe and north Africa.

His research demonstrates that a considerable number of Jews are likely to have died on the island from dysentery and disease. His view is that the push for a Soviet inquiry was a smokescreen. Roberts told The Observer: "The way I read it is that the investigation regarding the Russians was undertaken first as a diversion from war crimes against other nationalities, but also there was definitely discussion in the papers we can read that they wanted to guarantee access to Allied war graves on Russian territory. It was also about plausible deniability."

And Bright also introduces us to the work of Caroline Sturdy Colls, professor of conflict archaeology at Staffordshire University, who was the first to apply modern forensic techniques to sites on Alderney:

Although she has challenged the numbers cited by Roberts, Sturdy Colls also believes the scale of the Jewish atrocities has been downplayed. “It is evident from the wide range of testimonies available and from the surveys we did of the camps in which Jews were housed that they were treated appallingly, and more Jews likely died than we know of,” she said. “The conditions in which Jews were housed were an extension of those that they were kept in elsewhere in Europe. The camps on Alderney were part of a network of sites that housed Jews and harsh punishments, terrible working and living conditions, and torture characterised their lives on Alderney.”

She added that it was important to recognise the atrocities committed against other groups on Alderney – eastern Europeans and Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example. “Overall, the suffering of most of the people who were sent to Alderney and were under the control of Organisation Todt and the SS has been underplayed.”

Caroline Sturdy Colls's book Adolf Island: The Nazi Occupation of Alderney, written with Kevin Colls, was published last year. You can hear them talking about it in this Wiener Holocaust Library video.

A 1959 television interview with T.H. White

The BBC website has an archive of interviews with British novelists from Virginia Woolf to Zadie Smith.

Among them is an interview with my literary hero T.H. White, recorded at his home Alderney by Robert Robinson. He comes over very much as the schoolmaster he was before he became a writer.

Mention of Alderney recalls White's friendship with John Arlott. As Tim Arlott recorded it in his memoir of his father:

The first time they met, my father and Tim were so captivated by each other's company that they went out for a drink and did not return until late the following morning.